Our newest writer Simon Clark is a regular attendee of the annual UK Tech Fest. Below, Simon highlights eight qualities of the festival he’s noticed over the years. Click here for info on bands, venues, tickets and more. … Familiarity The inaugural Tech Fest weekend was held in a small…

Since we publish our individual Top 10 lists right after our main one, you can clearly tell that there are always albums missing for each writer from the general list. We embrace that fault as one of the inevitable limitations of general lists for the collective power such aggregations hold; we wouldn’t give up doing a main list, ever. However, it’s always been a habit of ours to allow each writer to highlight one album from their Top 10 selections that didn’t make the final cut. This allows us more flexibility and the chance to, one last time, shun a light on some of our favorite music from the year. In a fantastic year such as 2016, it’s almost a necessity, as our list, more than ever, misses out on so much of the greatness contained therein.

Editor’s note: welcome back to our Heavy Blog Guest List feature where we give some of the bands we covered (or just adored) in 2016 a chance to publish their own Top 10 Albums of 2016. This time around we have Cyborg Octopus, a band who produced one of the funnest and most well thought out progressive metal albums of the year. Their approach to differing influences, ideas and styles can definitely be seen reflected in their chosen Top 10, which is, once again, presented to you the reader completely unedited and untouched! If you’re interesting in the kind of music that a group with these far-flung tastes might make, check out their album below. Enjoy the list!

With our general list for 2016 out of the way, we can now shift the focus from our aggregate opinion to individual ones. Both outlooks have their own merit; the former provides us with an overview of our year in music. However, the latter shines a light on something we’re extremely proud of and that’s the varied and eclectic nature of our staff these days. We used to have a very certain type of music associated with Heavy Blog and while we still have a long way to go, we feel like we’ve done a good job at expanding our palettes and the representation of different kinds of music and metal in our staff. The lists below reflect that; you’ll find black metal, avant-garde, technical thrash metal, hip hop, rap, noise, ambiance, post metal and rock, melodic death metal and much more throughout these lists.

For those who missed our last installment, We post biweekly updates covering what the staff at Heavy Blog have been spinning. Given the amount of time we spend on the site telling you about music that does not fall neatly into the confines of conventional “metal,” it should come as no surprise that many of us on staff have pretty eclectic tastes that range far outside of metal and heavy things. We can’t post about all of them at length here, but we can at least let you know what we’re actually listening to. For those that would like to participate as well (and please do) can drop a 3X3 in the comments, which can be made with tapmusic.net through your last.fm account, or create it manually with topsters.net. Also, consider these posts open threads to talk about pretty much anything music-related. We love hearing all of your thoughts on this stuff and love being able to nerd out along with all of you.

Hello everyone, welcome to psychology 101. In today’s class we’re gong to be looking at a host of psychological biases and contextualising them through numerous examples found within the music community. Most people already know what a bias is, but let’s start off with a definition to make sure we’re…

*prognotes breaks down and analyses your favourite metal and progressive concept albums lyrically and musically. Read other entries in this series here. Welcome back to our *prognotes on Slice the Cake’s Odyssey to the West. For those that missed it, you can read the first half of our analysis here.…

Obviously, we talk about news. That is the established format of this podcast after all! We talk about the new Painted in Exile album (finally!), The Corelia kickstarter, the new Avenged Sevenfold album (that came out of nowhere), the new Korn album (yep), the Scale the Summit “breakup”, the Allegaeon Patreaon, Frontierer’s first live show and Arkona’s new old song. We also reflect back on things, like Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory turning 16 and our discussion on Slice the Cake from last week. We also mention a few other things, like a Guitar Hero chart of A Sense of Gravity’s Echo Chasers, and some shitty flute covers, including this excellent one of Dragonforce’s masterpiece. Then, our underrated album, which is Rishloo’s Living As Ghosts With Buildings As Teeth. Also, our cool people section covers some important topics! I promise!

2016 has been a great year for our *prognotes feature, and here we are with yet another mammoth album to explore. Slice the Cake’s Odyssey to the West clocks in at a massive 77 minutes, and that’s without even looking at the 28 minute accompanying EP Odyssey to the Gallows which acts as a prologue. Today we’ll only be looking at the LP, so strap yourselves in because this is going to be a long one, and we’d best be getting started.

Last year, we had a narrative. Following on the footsteps of the late, great Brian Shields, we had declared this, our time, The Golden Age™ of Metal. Releases were coming in in flurries and the quality was just as good. We got several of the best albums in recent memory…